College World Series: Covid Madness and Hypocrisy
By forfeiting a college team due to Covid scare, the NCAA shows clumsiness and sets reckless example
(Photo Credit: Newsweek)
There is no entertainment product I’ve consumed more in the month of June than the College World Series.
Starting with softball and now baseball, every night at 6 pm is like watching a new episode of a compelling drama series. It’s the best binge watch show since “Ozark” on Netflix.
But just as we were approaching the penultimate episodes, or in the case of CWS, the final series, COVID-19 madness reared its ugly head.
Let me correct that. It wasn’t COVID-19. It was the bureaucracies in charge of the event—the NCAA and local public health agency—that got in the way and ruined the best thing on television this month (apologies to fans of “The Bachelorette.”)
A quick timeline of events that forced one of the final four teams—North Carolina State—to forfeit out of the tournament.
—Friday, North Carolina State played its game against Vanderbilt with 13 players, losing 3-1. The rest of the roster, about a dozen or so players, had either tested positive for COVID-19 (four players) or ruled out due to contact tracing and/or vaccination status (around 19.)
—the NCAA ordered unvaccinated players from the field in Omaha and told them they would not be allowed to play in the game. This order had nothing to do with COVID-19 testing status, strictly due to vaccination status.
—the unvaccinated players all tested negative for COVID-19. A large group of healthy, teenaged and 20-something college athletes were not able to play in a World Series college game because they were unvaccinated. Yes, that’s an actual rule.
—because N.C. State had four positive COVID-19 tests, it triggered “outbreak” labeling and procedures. All members of the Wolfpack team got tested Friday night, including vaccinated athletes who played in the team’s 3-1 loss to Vanderbilt earlier that day.
—a round of testing yielded four new positives, all by vaccinated players. Early Saturday morning, around 1 a.m., the NCAA decided that it wasn’t “safe” for the Wolfpack to play its scheduled game against the Commodores later that day and ruled the game forfeit. Vanderbilt advanced to the CWS finals, and N.C. State took the next flight out of Omaha, having been tested and contact traced out of what for most team members, was a once-in-a-lifetime experience to compete for a national championship.
The website d1baseball.com has a more detailed recap of events, but that’s what happened in a nutshell.
And what a nutty, absurd situation created by those in charge—the NCAA and Douglas County Health Department, the local agency in Omaha.
Why is this important? Why is this circumstance in Omaha worth a forensic re-accounting and more thorough investigation?
Because hyper-emotional responses to Covid are still happening. Reckless rules, not grounded in data but in fear, remain intact. When these elements collide at a large scale event like the College World Series, it emboldens the Lockdown Lords, many of whom are still out there, and gives them permission to dig in even more on their fear-based policies.
Another aspect of this story that is troubling is an identity plague moving through our country—vaccination labeling.
In Omaha, members of the N.C. State baseball team were told they couldn’t play only because they were unvaccinated. That’s blatant vax labeling, a dangerous road we are going down as we get farther removed from the Year of the Virus and deeper into the Year of the Vaccine.
Here in Illinois, the latest guidance from the state on youth sports looks like this:
This guidance is fairly binary—if vaccinated, no restrictions. If not, mask up for indoor sports. That’s pretty straight forward.
But these protocols, last updated on June 11, remain absent of data to authenticate why unvaccinated kids are in danger while playing an indoor sport while maskless. There is no data to support this distinction, just public health officials assumptions based on anecdotes that masking up indoors will prevent the spread of Covid while playing sports.
By making the labeling so clear, the vaccine coercion is fairly transparent.
Young men and women…get vaxed, and we view you as valued human beings with virtuous freedoms. Reject vaccination? We don’t see you as a full-formed individual and someone who deserves the same freedoms as your vaccinated peers.
What happened in Omaha with the North Carolina State baseball team confirms the misguided spread of this hazardous dichotomy.
A common push back and response to events like those in Omaha this past weekend is this—why not just get the darn vaccine? Why fight public health policy? The rules are the rules. Just go along with it and life will be a heckuva lot easier.
Yes it would be. And I acknowledge legitimacy to that argument in a team sports situation like N.C. State.
Team sports, or least an important aspect to it, is subjugating individual desires for the welfare of the team, the sum of the parts being greater than the whole.
Players knew the Covid protocols going into the tournament (or at least had a general idea.) Rules swing much more in favor of vaccinated players, the risk of the season being derailed greater the more players who refuse to get vaccinated.
So be a team player and just get the damn shot.
But I don’t accept that argument. The excessive Covid regulations, almost 16 months after the “novel coronavirus” first swept the nation, are the problem.
First off, we don’t know the medical history of the those players that didn’t get vaccinated. Maybe they already had Covid and tested positive for antibodies. They may have come to the reasonable conclusion that their natural immunity, as an 18-22 year old healthy college athlete, is stronger than that of a drug.
Second, according to d1baseball.com, two of the initial four positive tests that led to the forfeiture of games were from unvaccinated players. When the “outbreak” status forced a round of testing for all players Friday night, it resulted in four more positive tests. All four had taken the COVID-19 vaccine.
So if the NCAA is going to unfairly declare unvaccinated players out of the biggest game of their lives, which they did prior to testing them for COVID-19, what is the point of testing vaccinated players? Why one set of rules for vaccinated players and another for unvaccinated, when they all ended up getting tested anyway? Why are we still testing at all?
Oh, and let’s not forget the fans that jammed the stadium in Omaha.
The NCAA did not miss the opportunity to brag about the attendance numbers inside TD Ameritrade Park:
Almost 21,000 maskless people, no one knowing or caring about vaccination status, all crammed together watching baseball, spending thousands upon thousands of dollars on tickets, food, beer and merchandise. Good for them—those folks have a choice how to spend their money and they choose to do so at a college baseball tournament.
That’s all well and good. But it’s not OK for the athletes who provide the free labor with which those fans are watching and being entertained by to play because the functionaries who are profiting off that free labor deem the environment “unsafe?” And how are 21,000+ not socially distant fans more danger from athletes playing a socially distant, outdoor sport than from each other?
And what of the overreaching, hopeless NCAA? Rather than be an advocate for student-athletes, the incident in Omaha undermines the "amateur" experience they so desperately are trying to preserve.
The hypocrisy is so blatant it’s almost criminal.
Of course, we’re used to seeing such a scenario play out in Illinois.
And when it happens at the level of a collegiate national championship, it only greases the wheels for potential future injustices.
What could that look like?
Quarantines for unvaccinated students. No remote access to academic classes while in quarantine. Mandatory testing for ALL athletes, regardless of vaccination status. School districts making decisions independently from public health recommendations, not on the side of objective data, that would make the environment more open and secure, but enabling a climate where fear-based anecdotes drive policy, not facts.
In Omaha, the local public health agency, Douglas County, reportedly did not agree with the severe action taken by the NCAA towards the North Carolina State baseball team.
This according to the Associated Press:
Douglas County Health Department spokesman Phil Rooney said the health department did not recommend NC State's removal but told the NCAA the department would support whatever decision the NCAA made.
Rooney said the health department provides assistance to the NCAA in testing and contact tracing but is limited in mandating procedures related to COVID-19 because there is no local directed health measure in effect.
Sounds like the NCAA pulled the old “abundance of caution” card out of the Covid Overreaction stack.
Aren’t we past this by now?
The events of this past weekend reveal we are not.
And vaccine labeling? That’s just getting started.
Athletes and non-athletes, rather than be defined by character and performance, will be tagged as “vaxed” or “non-vaxed.”
Who wouldn’t want that distinction when introduced at an awards banquet?
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